Pope Benedict XVI wants Catholic colleges to ensure that faculty are faithful to church doctrine

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday (May 5) called on Catholic colleges and universities in the United States … Continued

by Alessandro Speciale| Religion News Service

VATICAN CITY — Pope Benedict XVI on Saturday (May 5) called on Catholic colleges and universities in the United States to do more to affirm their “Catholic identity,” particularly by ensuring the doctrinal orthodoxy of their faculty and staff.

Speaking to a group of bishops from Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Wyoming, who are in Rome on a regularly scheduled visit, Benedict said there has been a “growing recognition” on the part of Catholic colleges of the need to “reaffirm their distinctive identity.”

But “much remains to be done,” the pope said, singling out the church law requirement that Catholic theology teachers “have a mandate from the competent ecclesiastical authority,” usually the local bishop.

That requirement was introduced more than 20 years ago by Benedict’s predecessor, Pope John Paul II, according to the Rev. Scott Brodeur, a professor at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. But there has been “continuous resistance against it.”

“If he is repeating it it is because it has not yet been fully implemented,” Brodeur said.

Benedict’s remarks come a few months after U.S. bishops denounced Sister Elizabeth Johnson, a theology professor at Jesuit-run Fordham University in New York. Johnson’s book “Quest for the Living God” does not accord with “authentic Catholic teaching,” said the bishops’ doctrinal committee.

Benedict said Saturday that the need for theology professors to be faithful to church doctrine becomes “all the more evident” when considering the “confusion” created by “instances of apparent dissidence between some representatives of Catholic institutions and the Church’s pastoral leadership.”

“Such discord,” the pope added, “harms the church’s witness and, as experience has shown, can easily be exploited to compromise her authority and her freedom.”

Benedict also urged American bishops to ensure that young people receive a “sound education in the faith,” saying that this is the “most urgent internal challenge facing the Catholic community in your country.” Affirming a university’s Catholic identity “entails much more than the teaching of religion” and should be achieved by encouraging students to embrace faith in “every aspect of their education,” the pope said.

Copyright: For copyright information, please check with the distributor of this item, Universal Uclick.

This is such a mistake, such a huge mistake. We do not need to “shelter” young people from unorthodox ideas – the world is full of them. We need to help them explore those ideas.

Pope Benedict’s ideas are turning the Church into a parady of what Vatican II made possible. The Church is shrinking because it cannot engage in the world and with the world. So the official Church is it withdrawing and trying to get other Catholics to withdraw with them.

Silencing Sister Elizabeth Johnson silenced many others theologians, who now speak in whispers. Silencing bishops and priests who want a dialogue on many modern issues is an attempt to avoid actually dealing with the world as it is today. Core faith issues are real and not challenged. But, ideas about birth control, celibacy, female priests, and gay marriage are not core issues of faith – they are interpretations of old traditions that desperately need re-examining, just as getting women the right to vote and denouncing slavery as evil were accomplished in many parts of the world, without the help of the Catholic Church.

irishsmile

Thank you for saying it! The door swings both ways in the Catholic church> No one HAS to be or remain a Catholic; however, it is past due time to tell the anti-Catholic folks and the pretend Catholic folks to flake off.